Product Description
“More than any thing else technology makes our world. It makes our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet, until now the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from — how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions — Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today — hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions.
The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur clarifies how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to “thinking outside the box,” or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are place together from pieces — themselves technologies — that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to make further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms — it makes itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies.
Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonder fully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we reckon about technology and how it structures our lives.
Posted in 
Tags: 
The author writes “the purpose of this book was to make a theory of technology-”a coherent group or general propositions”-that gives us a framework for understanding what technology is and how it works in the world.”
The fundamental concept that technology evolves, or as the author describes “combinatorial evolution” is flawed. The engine that propels evolution is random changes that enhance or diminshes the chance of survival. Over time, those with the advantages survive, while those with the disadvantages die out. Design, but, is an active process to identify and improve/optimize key positive characteristics, and to remove undesired characteristics. In today’s engineering world, the design team develops products to meet specific requirements, while optimizing performance, cost, and schedule. (please, this is NOT a reference to Religious Intelligent Design.)
Perhaps it may have been right in the early years of mankind that technology was advanced by chance happenings, but, the author does a huge dis-service to our modern product development. Engineering is a Science, not an Art. It is not merely re-combining technology B with technology D. Mathematics, and Physics are the fundamental building blocks of Engineering. Prototyping, Computer Simulations, Mathematical Modeling and Analysis, are some of the tools of today’s Engineer.
Generally speaking, R&D has been the means to invent new technology (Physists, Chemist, Biologist, …), and Engineering has been the engine that improves and “productizes” technology for society. Sadly, due to our shift to small term profits, R&D and Product development budgets are being slashed (and the work has been moving off-shore), and we are seeing a general decline in a science based education when compared to other nations. We have become a Service based economy, and are loosing our ability to compete globally.
If one were to believe this book, science based education has small to do with in developing and maintaining our technological edge. So the danger going forward, is losing our technological advantage because we do not know the causal relationship to Science in our Education, R&D, and Product Development.
Rating: 1 / 5
Brian Arthur’s books starts off with the premise that there are fundamental principles that underlie technology (in the broad sense of the word.) But, he fails to deliver on this premise beyond some rather superficial notions such as the fact that technological artifacts are “purposed” and that they are constructed from artifacts that themselves incorporate technologies. In the process he recounts the historical development of a number of artifacts (the P&W JT9D engine, the LM’s F35C as well as others.) These do make for fascinating reading, I admit. Indeed if the author had intended the book to be an introduction to technology at the junior high school level, the book would be a nice addition to the field. But, this does not seem to be the purpose of the book, which is intended to be a scholarly search for the fundamental principles on which every technology (or technological artifact) is based. Had I had the chance to read the draft manuscript, I would have advised the author to study a few of the textbooks on engineering design that address the issue he is trying to capture in his book. These are written by experts in the field who have spent years deliberating the nature of technology in the context of engineering design (David Ullman’s Mechanical Design Process or Nam Suh’s Axiomatic Design, or the classic German text by Pahl/Beitz: Grundlagen erfolgreicher Produktentwicklung, among others.) Their writings, could well have helped the author step back from the grandiose statements made in the book and leave the issue to those whose profession is development of technologies and not merely to learn about them from texts that are several steps removed from the actual process of developing technological artifacts.
Rating: 1 / 5
Arthur has excellent thoughts which point in the right direction. Technology IS an evolutionary system. It DOES work using his methods of combining existing technologies and recursion. He shows that hierarchical levels of stable building blocks help a system increase in complexity.
But, I reckon he is not so clear that when new “domains” – such as electricity – are opened and new fundamental technological building blocks are learned and added to existing building blocks. These then enter the realm of all existing technologies and all can combine into new technologies. How do these new domains appear?
Also, he is still incorrect about a fundamental aspect of technology. Arthur makes natural phenomena the genes of technology. But this cannot be, since gene equivalents must mutate or change in order for evolution to occur. Obviously natural laws do not change, so they cannot be the genes. He is at the level of describing biology and its evolution without knowing about what exactly are the genes. Still he is far better than most writing in this field. At least he is on the road to understanding that technology’s evolution must have some sort of genetics. He is just incorrect as to what are technology’s genes. Certainly worth a read.
Rating: 4 / 5
iPhone brought in host of existing techology together in an elegant way, but didn’t bring a new phenomena into the product. They took the next step in combinatorial technology evolution by combining 100s of technologies in a unique way; it built upon these 100s of technologies built over many decades. Once you have a new technology like this, this (iPhone iteself) will be another tool to be used in combination with numerous other technologies to make even more technologies (eco-system)… This is the avalanche effect this book is clarifies. There are other technologies which bring to practice nature’s phenomenon in nature or new observation in math (e.g. algorithms) and bring into product. The combination of these two (application of new phenomenon and (new) recombination of existing technologies) applied recursively clarify the technology evolution. Given the number of technologies, trillions of combination are possible. The real advances are made when the newer technology meets the economic constraints of the given time. I was working on a new product proposal while I was listening this… I thought, the product was JUST a new combination. Recombination explanation made me realize this was progress too (hopefully).
This book will help you place technology in an economic context, but unlikely to help you to come up with a new product (combination) or predict if a technology is going to be successful. It’s intended to provide a coherent theory of technology evolution. So, the author is addressing the needs of academicians as well as general business/technology readers(like me). So, it’s a bit long for the core message author wants to present.
See also: Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
Rating: 4 / 5
This is an outstanding, fresh, new, informational, thought provoking, very fascinating book. I read all books having to do with science and technology. I am a science teacher and I like to find new thoughts and information. This book is special and will go down as a classic. For the first time an author has studied technology and made it a science to study. Technology is so vital to our society, that everyone should read and learn what it is all about. This book gives the answers to the questions about technology that controls everyone’s life. Very seldom do I find a book that has new information instead of compiling other’s work. I have so much respect for the author and wish I could write such a masterpiece.
Rating: 5 / 5